Update: See Ami Isseroff here

“What’s a Neo-Jew?” asks a bemused David T, over on Harry’s Place. I have to admit that I don’t have a clear answer, but - given that it appears in Jennifer Loewenstein’s stream of hate on Counterpunch - I think we can all conclude that it’s not meant as a compliment.

David makes an observation that bears repeating: irrespective of its leftist branding, Counterpunch is a far-right journal. Antisemites like Gilad Atzmon, Michael Neumann and Jeffrey St. Clair regularly publish there. Their take on Zionism and Israel is less of the old-fashioned, Jewish Marxist “Zionism is a diversion from the class struggle” line, and more in tune with the “Zionism controls the banks, the media and the US government” theme espoused by Ahmadinejad and David Duke.

So it is with Loewenstein’s rant about a “Gazan Holocaust.” She starts by relaying a communication from a Palestinian friend about life in Gaza under bombardment; she ends with this extraordinary and chilling burst of hate speech:

How, for example, would the 47-year-old Sapir College student like to know that his death has been far more useful to his State than his life? For in death he provided another pretext to carry out mass murder of the Arab Untermenschen
blocking the otherwise pleasant view to the sea in the southeastern Promised Land. His death challenged the Israeli rules of combat: the “We kill and You Die” warfare, the only type allowed by the Neo-Jewish Masters and their allies in the United States who have no intention of making a just peace with the lower forms of life in their midst…The leaders of the hapless Sderot student’s racially pure dreamland are grateful for his dying: Now the angry flames of intolerance can burn on feverishly. Into those flames the bodies of each dead Gazan man, woman or child should be flung, like books, to consecrate the ritual, the burnt offering, of those who owe the latter-day Israelites their Modern Day Zion. In Holy Victimhood shall We Reign Supreme.

Note, in that last sentence, the interplay of Old Testament imagery with the insistence that Israel is engaged in the ritual sacrifice of non-Jews. Now, where have I heard that one before?

Some readers might be tempted to forgive Loewenstein her anger; after all, no-one is going to pretend that life in Gaza is easy at the moment. Somewhere in her rant is a concern with human rights.

Two points. First, it’s selective: indeed, she seems to get a perverse kick out of Israeli suffering, as evidenced by her ludicrous claim that the Israeli government needs dead Israelis to justify what is essentially a “scorched earth” policy inspired by (who else?) the Nazis.

Second, it’s dishonest. Counterpunch, after all, is a publication that has been scathing about other, far graver, human rights emergencies around the world, from Darfur to Kosovo: hyperbole about human suffering is acceptable only if Americans and Israelis (or should that be “Neo-Jews”) can be fingered as the agents behind it.